Thursday, September 07, 2017

It's time for fruit farmers to celebrate! As horticulture production outgrows food grain output in the country for the fifth consecutive year, the growth of India's horticulture is being intertwined with the progress of the food processing industry.

Starting the investment at the farm gate through the processing value chain to the ultimate consumer, and then ploughing it back to the farm gate forms the virtuous fruit circular economy, and this has the potential to improve the lives of India's farmers.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Is it time to change tactics with regard to privacy and Aadhaar? It seems likely that the Act will be upheld as constitutional, when looked at whether it falls foul of our fundamental right to privacy.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

For many women in India, the Supreme Court stood on the right side of history today after it struck down the practice of instant divorce called triple talaq, practiced by Sunni Muslims in the country.

In a 3-2 judgment, Justices Kurian Joseph, RF Nariman and UU Lalit struck down the practice of instant divorce, describing it as "illegal and sinful" and ruling that it violates the right to equality enshrined in the Indian constitution.

Wednesday, August 09, 2017

There is no official data to back up the prime minister’s claim that the use of “Aadhaar and technology” had led to the discovery of nearly 4 crore bogus ration cards.

Nobody in the Narendra Modi government seems to know where the prime minister got the data on the basis of which he told the Lok Sabha that the use of technology and Aadhaar led to the discovery of 3.95 crore bogus ration cards (from 1:19 onwards in the video below), Right to Information Act activist Anjali Bharadwaj on Tuesday claimed at a press conference organised to “expose the false claims of the government about the benefits of Aadhaar”.

Friday, August 04, 2017

Ayurveda giant Patanjali’s rise to success has been nothing short of a phenomenon.

The Haridwar-based company, which sells everything from herbal soaps and shampoos to ghee and honey, has become a favourite among millions of Indian households, chipping away at the dominance of big multinational firms.

Yet, few know about the inner workings of the Rs10,000 crore behemoth founded in 2006 by Acharya Balakrishna and yoga guru Ramdev. The latter rose to fame doing yoga asanas on TV in the mid-2000s, before playing a role in the anti-corruption movement that swept the country earlier this decade, gaining many political enemies in the process.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

If some drugs remain effective well beyond the date on their labels, why hasn’t there been a push to extend their expiration dates?

The box of prescription drugs had been forgotten in a back closet of a retail pharmacy for so long that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Most were 30 to 40 years past their expiration dates – possibly toxic, probably worthless.

Even as most other firms seek talent from top-ranked tech institutes, Zoho Corporation hires high-school graduates and trains them over 18 months.

Not inclined to pursue his studies beyond high school, 17-year old Abdul Alim dropped out of school in 2013. Unable to find a job in his hometown in North East India, Alim moved to Chennai in the South with nothing more than Rs 200 in his pockets.

Altruistic surrogacy alone will deprive many would-be parents of options. Earlier last month, a couple in our family successfully got custody of their newborn through surrogacy. Filled with emotional highs and lows, the past nine months left the parents-to-be disillusioned about the prevailing surrogacy practices.

Following a successful embryo transfer, the surrogate, after receiving a hefty advance payment, went underground despite the formal facilitation of the process by a reputed gynaecologist. She appeared only a month after delivery to hand over the parents' prized possession. The blessed parents swiftly forgot their misery as soon as all the paperwork was completed and they received their little bundle of joy in their hands. After all, their dream of having their biological child had finally come true.

Public diplomacy is a buzz word that has been around for decades, but today it is well ensconced with a significant other – social media.

Diplomacy is a fine art, heir to centuries of epochal deal making, system building, peacemaking and conflict avoidance and resolution – it is, in many ways, a profession for the ages. In the minds of men and women at large, however, it is also seen as a profession conducted in rarefied environs, in dizzying ivory-towered heights, away from the hurly-burly of earthling life. In India, I have often faced the perennial question,

There is reduced genetic variation among the people of some subpopulations because they have been genetically isolated due to various factors – such as caste.

The occurrence of genetic diseases in certain subpopulations in India and other countries in South Asia is well known. Indian scientists now suspect that this could be due to genetic isolation caused by endogamous marriages over generations.

Saturday, July 15, 2017

The social media is now literally everywhere. Abuse on social media is hurtful and unacceptable, but it will not be easy to stop this ugly trend.

It has been phenomenal in its rise. The social media is now literally everywhere. Across the world, people have taken to blogging, tweeting and Facebooking with such fervour that at times the traditional media seems to be a pre-historic creature. With very few moderators vis-à-vis the number of social media users, it has become almost a free-for-all match on the worldwide web. There is so much blah blah blah all around us that it even prompted a columnist of a British newspaper to say that he is discontinuing his column to reduce word emissions. He was joking, of course.

Friday, July 07, 2017

Nara Chandrababu Naidu’s ‘Sunrise Andhra Pradesh-Vision 2029’ aims to make the state India’s most developed, overcoming the legacy issues that came with the creation of Telangana.

In the calendar of the state administration of Andhra Pradesh, the second day of the week is not a Monday. Instead, it is designated Polavaram day—after the ambitious multi-purpose irrigation project that entails interlinking the unruly waters of the Godavari and the Krishna to bridge the water deficit in the latter’s river basin.

Wednesday, July 05, 2017

"No matter how much I'm going to study...just studies is not going to be enough."

A farmer’s son who didn’t own a computer until college has become the toast of India’s hackathon scene.

Now a prominent face in the circuit, Ravi Suhag has made it a habit of sorts to win hackathons, where programmers from different fields—students, employees, hobbyists—get together to code over a short period of time. Each event usually has a prescribed challenge that coders solve over, say, 48 hours, either individually or in small groups.

After six months of the 'cashless' marathon, the picture of this model cashless village began fading.

After demonetisation threw the entire country into a tizzy, this village in Kamareddy district was celebrated as the first cashless village in December 2016.

While urban places such as the district headquarter, Kamareddy, struggled to transition to a cashless economy, Ugrawai of Kamareddy mandal with a population of 1,500, delighted everyone by their embracing of technology.

However, after six months of cashless marathon, the picture of this model cashless village began fading.

Friday, June 30, 2017

Asrar Jamayee’s satire was once awarded by the first Indian President, Dr Rajendra Prasad. Now, even local mushairas don’t invite him.

Asrar Jamayee, 80, an eminent Urdu poet, was declared dead by the Social Welfare Department of South Delhi in 2013, depriving him of his monthly pension of Rs 1,500. Since then, he has been fighting for survival. He lives alone in a rented single roomlittered with Urdu books (including his newly published ones, which lie under a thick layer of dust) and worn-out shervanis.

Friday, June 09, 2017

India is in the grip of the great jobs fear-mongering. At the core of this is the mis-informed impression that jobs in India have shrunk/are shrinking. That's far from truth. Yes, there's a neighbour here and a cousin there who has either lost her job or hasn't found a suitable job for a prolonged period of time but the truth is that the job scenario-though challenging--isn't as gloomy as it is being made out of be.

Comprehensive data on jobs is notoriously patchy. But anything that is available points to the fact that India is still producing jobs, even though at a slower pace than 2 years ago. That effectively means that the overall job market in the country continues to grow, rather than shrink.

Inside a bright green and yellow outlet of Chaayos in Delhi’s Connaught Place neighbourhood, Swati Singh is taking some respite from the heat. But the Delhi University student isn’t sipping the usual cold coffee or lime soda; instead, she’s savouring a cup of saunf (fennel seed) chai, one of the many varieties offered by a chain that has made India’s unofficial national beverage its flagship product.
“…mostly we end up going to the coffee places like Starbucks or Cafe Coffee Day, (but) this place seems worth trying,” the 22-year-old said, adding that she liked the idea of experimenting with all the different tea flavours.

Friday, June 02, 2017

After a year of layoffs, downsizing, and even shuttering of businesses, food tech startups are back to receiving funding and planning expansions. On May 19, FoodPanda’s parent company Delivery Hero raised $431.45 million. On May 30, Bengaluru-based Swiggy raised $80 million from South African firm Naspers in a Series-E round.

With this, the amount that Swiggy has raised since its launch in 2014 has touched $155 million, while its larger rival Zomato has raised $243 million over nine years, according to data on Crunchbase.

The lure of going to work in the US’ information technology (IT) sector is often blamed for causing a brain-drain in India but new research shows it helped power the country’s own IT boom, too.

As computer science-related occupations began to grow in the US in the nineties, the proportion of foreigners in the field grew from 9% in 1994 to 24% in 2012. That spurt was almost entirely driven by Indians drawn by the promise of higher wages for the same work. By 2014, 86% of computer science H-1B visas, used by US tech firms to bring in skilled labour from abroad, had been acquired by Indians, who became a useful pool of English-speaking and highly-skilled labour in an era of technological innovations and increasing software demand.

Saturday, May 27, 2017

What if advertisers found a stealthy new way to get their pitch across — a form of messaging perceived more as a friendly recommendation than hard sell? In an over-crowded media environment, marketers would surely flick to such an innovation.

And they have. In the nascent realm of social media influencing, paid endorsements are burgeoning. Celebrities and other influencers present their taste and choices in the marketplace as nothing more than the act of sharing tips with fans and the public — even while failing to make clear that, often, they are being paid to do so.